"There are two fundamental reforms that we need: adequate capital, and two, to get far higher levels of enforcement of fraud statutes. Existing ones...I'm not even talking about new ones. Things were being done that were certainly illegal and clearly criminal in certain cases. Fraud is a fact..fraud creates very considerable instability in competitive markets. If you cannot trust your counterparties, it won't work, and indeed, we saw that it didn't."

The November 1910 Jekyll Island meeting that gave birth to the Federal Reserve was shrouded in secrecy. According to author Edward Griffin, Forbes founder Bertie Charles Forbes said the event was so secret that the full names of the attendees were not mentioned once. Attendees of this "most secret expedition in the history of American finance" reportedly included the powerful Senator Nelson Aldrich and several leading bankers of the time.